Reading Life: Books For The Ages

In 12 far-reaching and intimate essays, Birkerts reflects upon his first readings of classic texts, including "The Catcher in the Rye" and "Lolita," and what later encounters reveal about time, memory, and the murmuring transistors of selfhood.

A new, compelling collection of essays by Sven Birkerts, "one of America's most distinguished, eloquent servants of the poetry and fiction that matter" (Susan Sontag)
"Reading, the mind's traffic in signs and signifiers, is the most dynamic, changeful, and possibly transformational act we can imagine. To have read a work and have been strongly affected by it--and then to come back to it after many years--can be a foundation-shaking enterprise." In "Reading Life," virtuoso critic and essayist Sven Birkerts examines what it means to return to resonant works of fiction--the books one thinks of "covetously, as private properties," the "personal signposts" of one's inner life. For Birkerts, these include "The Catcher in the Rye," "Humboldt's Gift," "To the Lighthouse," and "Lolita," In twelve far-reaching and intimate essays, Birkerts reflects upon his first readings and what later encounters reveal about time, memory, and the murmuring transistors of selfhood.